1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to receiving and reconciling physical inventory data with the data stored in an asset management system. More particularly, the preferred embodiments are directed to receiving and reconciling physical inventory data related to computing resources against an asset management database of those computing resources.
2. Background of the Invention
In industries where assets of a corporation have long life spans and are not very portable, keeping an up-to-date asset management database is relatively simple. Periodically, a person or persons may take printouts or spreadsheets of the asset management database to the various affected corporate offices and verify the existence and location of these long-life span, non-portable assets. Once all the assets are found, or their dispositions determined, the person or persons may simply take the printout or spreadsheet of the asset management database back to a home office computer and update the information.
While these techniques may work well in some industries, tracking computer and computing assets in this way is wholly insufficient. Reconciling the physical inventory against the asset management database in the prior art, the manual method, may take three months or more to complete, including the time it takes to complete the physical inventory, as well as the time to manually reconcile each database entry against what was collected in the physical inventory. Three months worth of time for computing resources is very long, resulting in the movement, obsolesce, and replacement of a significant number of the computing resources before a manual method reconciliation can be completed. That is, because of the speed at which computing resources are outdated by advances in the computer industry and replaced, and also given the fact that the computing industry as a whole is moving towards smaller and more portable devices, these methods of reconciling the physical inventory of computing resources against those contained in an asset management database are insufficient.
Thus, what is needed in the art is a way to reconcile the physical inventory of computing resources against the entries in an asset management database very quickly, so that the asset management database is truly representative of the quantity, location, ownership and types of computing resources within the company.